Studies in Henry James (review)

R. P. Blackmur. Studies in Henry James. Ed. and with an introduction by Veronica Makowsky. New York: New Directions, 1983. 250 pp. $19.50. pb $9.25. R. P. Blackmur's posthumously coUected essays, Studies in Henry James, is a troubling and timely book. WeU, not quite a book, but a coUation of variously fugitive or fixated texts recording the evolution of "Blackmur's James." This new book, only titularly the one long promised by Blackmur, does not exactly tell us anything we didn't already know about James and perhaps little we hadn't encountered in Blackmur's career-long efforts on behalf of that "aesthetic exile" from American crudity—not even in bringing to light the long, posthumous fragment "The Spoils of Henry James: A Special Case of the Normal," the only piece appearing here for the first time. Still, because it is "Blackmur," this book must be taken into account in any assessment of American literary criticism—then and now, from Blackmur's situation to the present—his problems remain our own. One is of course reminded of the importance of his 1934 introduction to the Prefaces (even if, as the editor must admit, his categories are adapted from Pound's 1918 Little Review tribute), the suggestive elaboration and the dismissal of "executive form" in "The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry James" (1951), and the presiding ambivalence of "In the Country of the Blue" (1943), the crucial essay for assessing Blackmur's reading of James. More interesting still is what remains, editorial efforts notwithstanding, Blackmur's failure to finish his book, to have done with that writer who he said represented "the predicament of the sensitive mind during what may be caUed the interregnum between the effective dominance of the old Christian-classical ideal through old European institutions and the rise to rule of the succeeding ideal, whatever history comes to caU it" (91). Indeed, Blackmur is himself a transitional figure, standing between formalism and those recent critics who remain in transit away from New Criticism, using him as their American-made vehicle. For decades Blackmur promised Studies in Henry James, but with each successive essay, with each attempt he made to identify or analyze his near obsession with James, it became clear that his own resistance to system would allow him neither to complete nor to throw over his project of making the selfreflexive novelist the exemplary case of, as weU as for, "The Critic's Job of Work." The notion of James's "felt life," which belies a hope for some manner of counter-system to several reigning orthodoxies, is perfectly consonant with the New Critical autonomy of poetry and the privileged reader. For instance: "Criticism must be concerned first and last—whatever comes between—with the poem as it is read and what it represents is felt. And no amount of physics and physiology can explain the feeling of the things seen as green or even certify their existence, so no amount of linguistic analysis can explain the feeling of the poem" (Form and Value in Modern Poetry [Doubleday, 1957] 358-59). That manifestolike caU to a socially responsible criticism invokes a particularly Jamesian style of thought: "Fortunately, there exist archetypes of unindoctrinated thinking. Let us incline our minds like reflectors to catch the light of the early Plato and the whole of Montaigne. Is not the inexhaustible stimulus and fertility of the Dialogues and Volume 8 145 Number 2 The Henry James Review Winter, 1987 Essays due as much as anything to the absence of positive doctrine?" (FV 340). Written in 1935, in the midst of an engagement with James, that essay seems to appropriate Eliot's ironic comment about the "purity of James' mind." And, while it might be unfair to give that statement another screw, Blackmur himself remained vigilent against "violation by any idea." Indeed, what gives his writings on James their special urgency is his desire on the one hand to celebrate James's freedom from ideology and, on the other hand, to extract a mastering idea from the novels. When he outlined his job, James's criticism and novels were the "form" from which "values" could be gleaned...